What You Can Learn about PR from a Wine 101 Infographic

Did you know the US surpassed Italy and France recently as the world’s biggest wine market? If you did, perhaps you celebrated with a glass of wine? No doubt those in this category understand the finer points of the complex beverage, but for the rest of us, we might break a sweat simply deciding between red and white. So, how in the world can we make sense of all of wine’s finer details?

With so many critical details in this equation, including grape, vintage, food pairing, temperature, glass, accessories and more, one can clearly grasp that effective communications may demystify many of these issues. You could easily find plenty of written guides and videos online, but these often require serious focus and could also overwhelm you with information you may not need – they’re not exactly the quick resource you need when a wine list is in your hands!

In PR, often the most effective messaging tactics and strategies break things down into “snackable” or easily digestible components, so the intended audience has time to consider, understand, appreciate and ideally endorse what’s being recommended. These same principles are powerfully displayed in this intuitive, clean and incredibly well-organized infographic billed as “A Beginner’s Guide to Wine” (created by wineinvestment.com) – a piece of content that provides a basic overview touching all fundamental aspects of wine and, more importantly, why they matter. The infographic’s clean aesthetic lends itself well to social media, as it’s been shared to date over 2,500 times on Twitter and Facebook.

Persuasive infographics avoid force-feeding the viewer with too much information, and also keep the message trajectory flexible. What that means is if the viewer only wants to know a certain piece of information – in this case, let’s say he or she is knowledgeable on serving temperature but wants to know more about aroma – they can quickly navigate the content, identify what matters to them and walk away smarter in mere seconds. In other words, they don’t have to watch a 5 minute video, browse through an entire guide or even read the entire infographic from start to finish. Rather, the content does the work for them, through effective communication and design principles.

These same principles also explain why you can’t simply pair narrative text with pretty colors and shapes and expect to have an attractive and engaging infographic. Content creators must work closely with designers to align their expertise to achieve the critical goal of connecting with the intended audience. Your PR efforts, in turn, must have the entire creative team sharing and developing ideas together, not just bouncing bits and pieces of draft content to each other via email.

Connect with Racepoint Group Vice President Bobby Zafarnia on Twitter at @bzpr.